©  Dušan Kastelic

BRANE This is portrait of my friend Branko Gradisnik for the cover of his book "The Seven-Itch Year". Branko is writer, translator and one of the most intelligent and ingenious men I know. Later, when Branko decided to run for mayor of the capital city of Slovenia, he decided to use that same picture on his campaign posters. Very brave! (But I still have a bad feeling, that he wasn't elected because of my drawing :-()

This image was drawn entirely in Xara. (Except the shadows, which I had to blur elsewhere, because Xara has a really lousy Blur filter!)* I was a little worried, how the picture would look in large poster size, because of another limitation of Xara- the exported images cannot be larger than 4096 pixels** (which was in this case- the poster was 100 * 150 cm- only about 70dpi. As we know, standard for offset printing is at least 250dpi). But again- everything worked great! No "jaggies" at all. Moral of that story, good anti-aliasing is not only good for small pictures, but also for very large ones!

* Editor's Note: There two excellent blur filter options that are available in the Shareware Page Ladislav Seridi's SL Blur and Sean Sedward's Gaussian Blur plug-in filters.

** Editor's Note: Xara can export bitmap files upto four times larger than 4096 pixels but with a slight performance hit.

  1. Exit CorelXARA if you are running the application
  2. Enter the CorelXARA2 installation folder (default path C:\Program
  3. Files\Corel\CorelXARA 2)
  4. Rename the file xaradraw.dll to XDSmall.dll
  5. Rename the file XDLarge.dll to xaradraw.dll

This will enable large bitmaps to be both produced, rendered and printed (if using the Bitmap or Anti-alisased bitmap output option). The original graphics engine (optimised for speed) can resolve bitmaps with a maximum of 4096 pixels. The "larger" engine takes a (very) slight performance hit but enables images almost four-times as large to be produced.